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19 January 2020 at 23:48 #69251
Not to mention a pioneer PC operating system dubbed QDOS, bought for a song, which became the foundation of a multi-billion software empire 😉
19 January 2020 at 23:27 #69250A scavenger race like the Scythra are a bit of a puzzle, because surely, they’re intelligent, so why not tinker about the high-tech stuff they filch and figure some of it out? The tech they had which could disguise them as re-eyed humans was particularly impressive.
But who’s to say whether that technology was not also ‘borrowed’ ?
The Doctor said that the Skithra were a hive species, therefore implying that they operated as if they were a single coordinated organism, in this case directed by a queen who is the only individual with full agency, so that killing the queen will leave the worker Skithra completely incapacitated*. Even if the queen herself were intelligent and fully sentient, that would surely be a major inhibiting factor in their ability as a species to innovate or to develop the inventions of others.
*Just as a hive of bees becomes completely disorganised and dysfunctional if the queen bee is killed.
19 January 2020 at 22:53 #69241This was certainly an improvement on last week’s episode, and it is good to see Tesla take centre stage, with references to pretty much every visionary project on which he worked – and mostly failed to profit from or even be given the credit for until long after his death. In that context the Niagara generator might seem a bit of an irrelevance, since as far as I’m aware his involvement in that project was chiefly as a consultant and advisor on which AC system would most effectively transmit power from the generator once built*, but I suppose it made a suitably striking image with which to introduce the episode.
When he was working on wireless transmission apparently he did think at one point that he had picked up extra-terrestrial signals, which could in fact have been Marconi’s early attempts at terrestrial transmission (were they even aware of one another’s work in this field at this time?). And in the end, of course, Marconi got all the credit and the benefit.
The not-so-sub-textual parallel between the Skithra as plunderers and exploiters of other people’s technology and people such as Edison, who built his fortune chiefly by seizing on and developing the ideas and inventions of others was quite neatly done, and there are modern equivalents who come to mind 😈
*Others here may know better than I on this point.
18 January 2020 at 21:29 #69210As I don’t subscribe to Amazon Prime and so didn’t watch Good Omens when first shown, it has been one of the more cheering discoveries of the post-Christmas season to find Good Omens being shown on BBC. Enough, along with the new series of Doctor Who of course, to rouse me temporally from my seasonal dormouse syndrome torpor at any rate.
18 January 2020 at 21:11 #69209‘Qu’ils mangent de la brioche’* certainly shouldn’t be attributed to Marie Antoinette, since it was originally quoted in the autobiography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau where it is attributed only to ‘a great princess’, and this was written before Marie Antoinette even arrived in France. It has been suggested that it was in fact said by Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, but that is probably no more reliable an attribution. Poor Marie Antoinette was as much a victim of circumstances as anything, and a good deal of the vilification she endured during and after the Revolution was founded in xenophobia as much as her royal status – ‘l’autrichienne’ and so forth. And it isn’t as if she had much choice when she was married off to a French prince. She was only what? Fourteen?
One explanation for the apocryphal saying that I read, I forget where or when, was that there was at one time an ordinance in Paris that if bakers ran out of ordinary bread during the day they must sell more expensive breads at the same price, which would mean that it was a somewhat less callous or ignorant observation, but I have never come across any documentation confirming this.
* ‘Let them eat cake’ is perhaps slightly misleading as a translation, since I would have thought that brioche is more accurately defined as a type of bread made with an enriched dough. More expensive, yes, but not exactly cake either.
18 January 2020 at 12:00 #69203Meanwhile on this side of the Pond, with Brexit looming and our very own irresponsible mophead and his crew in charge, this comes to mind.
Not that I dislike my home city (where, for what it’s worth, a clear majority voted to remain in the EU), but if I were younger and had the opportunity ….
17 January 2020 at 21:34 #69197Either way, as the slogan for a certain UK cell phone network proclaimed a few years ago, ‘The future’s bright, the future’s Orange’ , but I’m thinking heavily smoked glass rather than shades 🙂
17 January 2020 at 21:25 #69196Not sure what happened there, but the video didn’t embed. Try again
17 January 2020 at 21:14 #69194Let us hope that the Mango Mussolini may at least be distracted from pressing the Button (no, not the one to summon his Diet Cokes) or
14 January 2020 at 20:07 #69092how do people expect anyone to be convinced about the science of climate change when the production team are apparently unaware that fire needs oxygen and the writer knows so little science they don’t realise an apex predator is at the top of a food chain?
Excellent point. As I wrote above, strict scientific plausibility is not essential to the majority of Doctor Who stories, but it is a very different matter when scientific accuracy is essential to a message they are trying to convey. In such cases would it break the budget to employ a scientific advisor?
14 January 2020 at 19:44 #69091about eight years ago I attained* an external hard drive with every Dr Who Show ever shown up until that point.
If so, the BBC, not to mention myriads of fans, would be delighted to know, because BBC practice during the 1960s was to wipe recordings and reuse the tapes, and there are a great many Doctor Who episodes from that period which are not known to survive 😈 No such thing as a hard drive in those days (and yes, I am more than old enough to remember those days very clearly).
* I suspect you mean obtained, and I have corrected the typo which follows. Sorry, such slips tend to bring out the pedant in me.
13 January 2020 at 22:47 #69061@peter3110
Doctor Who … did give me an interest in history and science which got me to read a lot more.
And if it did that it achieved exactly what it was meant to do in the original conception. It wasn’t intended to instruct in didactic fashion, it was intended to inspire.
Have you seen An Adventure in Time and Space, the drama about the shows origins and early days? If not, it might give you a clearer perspective.
13 January 2020 at 22:35 #69060Doctor Who may be allowed considerable latitude with regard to strict scientific plausibility but, yes, from the most remotely scientific viewpoint this episode was cringe inducing. Even the ‘science’ of Kill The Moon could be rationalised up to a point, and was in any case less critical to the theme of the episode as a whole. Generally I try to pick out what is positive about any episode, particularly because I know that I am a little biased against Chibnall as a writer and showrunner in this context, but there have been several occasions since he took over when my reaction to the ‘scientific’ premise has been, What the … ?
Maybe the writer and Chibnall et al. missed out on elementary science at school, or more likely they thought that the message was all that mattered and that scary monsters and a blizzard of action would be enough to blind people to the implausibility of the premise.
In any case, if any life form survives the apocalypse and ultimate trashing of the planet, everyone knows it will be the cockroaches 😉
13 January 2020 at 20:05 #69052… she also recognised that people reacted to her superficially because of her looks, so her sense of self-worth was actually quite disturbed,
Yes to that. I have the impression that our reading of Lucy is not in fact very different; it’s just our understanding of the meaning of ‘depressed’. To me that word denotes clinical depression, and although I understand that this can go with feelings of a lack of self worth or give rise to them, they are not necessarily concomitant.
The symptoms of clinical depression don’t always include suicidal thoughts and feelings of hopelessness, but they do generally include a flattening and shutting down of emotional response and a difficulty of engaging fully with the outer world. I doubt if any sufferer could fake the degree of vivacity and animation that Lucy displayed unless they were on extremely effective medication – and there was no indication that this was the case*. It seems simpler to explain her behaviour as a conscious or unconscious way of masking and compensating for her feelings of insecurity.
*But with only limited experience to go on I’m no expert, and I’m open to correction.
12 January 2020 at 23:35 #68994Wholly in agreement on the BBC’s radical adaptation of A Christmas Carol. I was out of the country during Christmas week, but recorded this, Dracula and more and came back to a televisual feast.
His Dark Materials was also something to be savoured, the more so because it led me to re-read the books with far greater enjoyment and appreciation than the first time, when I’m ashamed to say I was not especially impressed (maybe not in the right frame of mind).
12 January 2020 at 23:17 #68991It wasn’t just Planet of the Apes which came to mind; there was more than a hint of Alien in the editing of the first appearance of the Dregs as they invaded the dome, before they were revealed as humanoid in body.
… only this time it’s environmental apocalypse rather than nuclear apocalypse
It was shown to be both, I think. Environmental catastrophe -> large areas of the planet uninhabitable -> mass migration of survivors on an unsustainable scale -> social and political chaos ->war …. ? I would have to watch again to be absolutely certain, but I’m pretty sure that the Doctor’s explanation evoked a glimpse of a nuclear explosion . The message was delivered with all the subtlety of a steam hammer which will doubtless annoy a lot of people, but then the time for subtlety is probably long past.
The pace of the action was surely hectic enough to hold the attention and satisfy even the adrenaline junkies, and there was a lot of running in corridors for the traditionally minded. Amid the mayhem the brief interludes centred on the relationships between individuals were a useful counterpoint and a chance to focus on the personal, and the exchanges between Ryan and Bella were particularly telling since it expanded on what we have already learned about Ryan. The word Orphan in the title can also be seen as having a particular resonance in relation to those two, since Bella is alienated from an absent mother, while Ryan’s mother died early on and his father has largely been missing from his life.
10 January 2020 at 19:57 #68944You know, all this talk about The Timeless Child, and children, makes we wonder whether the Master and the Doctor had a child together, somewhere deep in their history.
And, might that be the big lie? Was something done to that child to steal him/her away?
I still very much doubt whether this has anything to do with any child the Doctor may have had, with or without the Master, even if it relates tangentially to the Doctor. But today I did something which maybe I should have done before I first contributed my ha’p’orth to the discussion; I looked up the transcript of the relevant exchange in The Ghost Monument, rather than relying on my memory alone.
Remnant: We see deeper, though, further back. The Timeless Child.
The Doctor: What are you talking about? What can you see?
Remnant: We see what’s hidden even from yourself, the outcast, abandoned and unknown.
The Doctor: Get out of my head.
To me that reads as ambiguous. The outcast referred to could be the Doctor as a child, the solitary child who cried himself to sleep in the barn; either an orphan or sent away from home to be trained as a soldier or initiated as a Time Lord. And the training and initiation of a child as a Time Lord seems to have been pretty abusive, even if not normally to the extent of the abuse the Master suffered. The Doctor’s reaction certainly suggests that it may have hit a very personal nerve.
On the other hand the outcast could be the Timeless Child and refer to the kind of myth that I suggested previously, and that is more consistent with what the Master says in his hologram message; the implication being that the truth underlying the myth was not as the Doctor and the Master at least, and perhaps all Time Lords, were taught or conditioned to believe. In which case, I agree, the parallel with the child in Omelas could stand up to a point. It is perhaps significant that the Master’s words evoked a flash of visual memory for the Doctor, suggesting some kind of embedded, perhaps racial memory, and we know that the Doctor was exposed at a fairly early age to the Matix, which is/was in part the collective memory of the Time Lords.
9 January 2020 at 21:08 #68935Spellcheck or autocorrupt. Sometimes it is best just to disable them and resort to an old fashioned dictionary printed on dead trees 🙂
9 January 2020 at 21:05 #68934What if the Child is effectively physically harnessed to all Time Lords -their very ability to be TLs contingent upon the role of the Child to exist across all dimensions & eternally?
I really like that idea, not least because it is compatible with my theory and also with the idea that the Time Lords are the result of radical genetic manipulation. The question remains, though, whether this is part of what the Time Lords have always believed about their origins, or whether it is part of a lie which undermines their very sense of identity, and I’m inclined to think the latter. I’m less sure of whether Le Guin’s fable is a relevant analogy other than it involves a child. The happiness and well-being of the people of Omelas depends on the child being utterly isolated and neglected from birth; fed and kept alive but imprisoned in squalor and deprived of any human contact, stimulus or material comfort. If the glimpse we had in the images triggered by the reference in the Doctor’s mind is anything to go by, the Child appeared to be richly, even ceremonially dressed and situated in the open beside a monumental building.
Welcome to the forum and the world of bonkers and sometimes not-quite-so-bonkers theories.
As far as I am aware there has never been any indication that a traveller in a Tardis can watch the acceleration of time into the future, like the traveller in Wells’s Time Machine, or watch it unravelling into the past. As @fatmaninabox has said, the theory of relativity and the laws of physics as understood so far would allow us to travel forward in time but not back, but the Doctor by his/her own account has witnessed the beginning and the end of the universe, and we have been shown something of that in various episodes.
In the original concept, travel in time and space was simply a convenient device to further the aims of the show in engaging a prospective young teenage audience with historical and scientific topics in an entertaining way, without any regard for what was scientifically plausible. Fifty six years down the line we just have to accept that the Time Lords found some way to circumvent the currently known laws of the physical universe. In The Doctor’s Wife the Tardis, as embodied in Idris, made it clear that she didn’t really understand the human concept of time*. She appeared to see the three spatial dimensions and the dimension(s) of time as a single four dimensional environment, a sea in which she could navigate in any direction.
The First Doctor was adamant that the past could not and should not be interfered with or altered in the slightest particular by any time traveller, but Moffat had a ball playing with the whole concept of time travel in his looping narratives. In his scenarios Gallifrey, thanks to the Doctor, could be simultaneously destroyed and not destroyed in the Time War, and both concepts remain true as far as the external universe was concerned. This could turn out to be another case of a Schroedinger’s Gallifrey, assuming that Chibnall is able to conceive and carry off such a convoluted arc.
*In The Day of the Doctor, the Moment had the same problem.
8 January 2020 at 20:56 #68907@thane16 @bluesqueakpip @juniperfish and anyone else who has been speculating about the Timeless Child and whom I may have overlooked.
Given the context of the references and the hints dropped, and after mulling over the question in what passes for my mind these days, I have ended up with a strong sense that the Timeless Child is/was some kind of foundational myth in Time Lord society; the myth of a child, perhaps born in extraordinary circumstances, who had extraordinary powers. Such powers might have been an innate ability to manipulate time, or simply to pass through time unaffected by it, and so the Child, or the myth of such a child, became in some fashion the inspiration for Rassilon and Omega (and perhaps other ‘Founding Fathers’) to create the technology which made the Time Lords possible.
At the very least it seems to be something which must lie at the base and origin of Time Lord society rather than something relating to the Doctor and/or the Master alone; something which cuts away the very roots of their sense of identity. The Master has never in our acquaintance with him been exactly sane, and the abuse and trauma which sent him over the edge means that he has always tended to overreact, but even so it would have to be a pretty horrific discovery to result in him destroying Gallifrey and thus his ultimate home. The Doctor’s reaction to his revelations, whether true or based on misinformation, suggest that she, also, was profoundly disturbed.
Come to that, has he incinerated the whole planet (and if so, how?), or just the Time Lord citadel?
7 January 2020 at 22:12 #68882Good to see you back again, and commiserations over the dysfunctional kidneys – quite enough to make life miserable, I know, and to explain your absence from the Forum. I hope that your reappearance means that they are now working as they should or are at least under control, and that you are feeling better.
Yes, Dracula is brilliant. That together with the first episode of the new Doctor Who series constituted a very rich diet for the first day of a new year, but worth any indigestion.
7 January 2020 at 22:02 #68881He makes her kneel to him, call him Master, just like previous incarnations would have done – and then he needs to talk to her and kneels down to do that.
And that, as much as anything, seems to me evidence that this is a post-Missy incarnation. He can’t sustain the arch enemy act and succumbs to a need to engage with her on equal terms – or even as a reluctant supplicant. Simm Master was at a psychopathic extreme and took a sadistic delight in humiliating the tenth Doctor, reducing him at one point to a shrivelled homunculus in a cage and only switching allegiance when he realised that he wasn’t going to receive the benefits and rewards he expected from Rassilon; and his attitude when he encountered the twelfth Doctor does not suggest that this last minute switch altered him significantly. In contrast, and in her uniquely perverse way, Missy was a flirtatious version who just wanted her friend back, even if it was strictly on her terms, and she treated him, friend or foe, as an equal throughout. When it came, finally, to a decision between the Doctor and her earlier incarnation she wavered on the brink of redemption and at the very last moment chose the Doctor, and the Dhawan Master seems not to have regressed far from that cusp. His notably unstable state and partial reversion to a ‘despicable me’ act could be attributed to the trauma of his discoveries and actions in the interim .
I doubt if those discoveries related to him alone, although in his worst incarnations he might well have been capable of incinerating his home planet in a fit of personal pique. The Timeless Child certainly doesn’t seem to refer to him alone, because when we first encounter the reference it is in the whispers of the Remnants as they wafted around the Doctor.
6 January 2020 at 22:49 #68871In a second viewing it isn’t a surprise that the theme and the narrative thread were easier to follow, but the time-loopy resolution also seemed more logical and less of a rush.
What struck even more forcefully than on first viewing, though, is the masterly (cough) way in which Sasha Dhawan conveys the internal contradictions and warring motives which @bluesqueakpip discussed in her post above. The full-on metaphorical moustache-twirling seems a not altogether convincing act in which he is trying as much reassure himself and to live up a the image of what he thinks he should be as recalled from earlier incarnations, as he is to assert dominance over the Doctor; but an underlying doubt and insecurity keep breaking through.
In the Gallery of Practical Science in 1843 he makes his entrance like the villain in a pantomime and, after theatrically disposing of a few random bystanders to demonstrate that he is still ‘not guid’, he tells the Doctor that in killing people he feels in his hearts he is doing what he was made for; but why, after so many successive lives, should he need such primal reassurance? And when she nevertheless confronts him steadily, looking him in the eye and asking him what he wants, his expression flickers and falters for a moment, revealing his underlying uncertainty and self doubt. He recovers immediately and demands that the Doctor kneel, but even as she complies it does not feel as if he is really in control, and so it proves. Later, after he is unable to resist the invitation to a one to one meeting with the Doctor on top of the Eiffel Tower, he opens the dialogue by indulging in a moment of personal reminiscence, asking if she has forgiven him for Jodrell Bank (the climactic encounter in which the fourth Doctor fell to his regeneration, although I hardly think that anyone here needs the reminder).
It is in his ultimate holographic appearance in the ruins of Gallifrey that his latent vulnerability is most apparent. He is half boasting that he has destroyed their home planet, but at the same time his distress is almost palpable and, although he could never bring himself to make things easy for her, I agree with Bluesqueakpip that it is fundamentally a plea for her to help him out of the colossal hole he has dug for himself.
6 January 2020 at 11:56 #68858I may have known who Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan were but, having just consulted what I wrote yesterday evening, I note that I wrote Child of Time* when I meant Timeless Child 😳 Tiredness or senility? It could be either, although I can still do the Times cryptic crosswords** so I I’m probably not yet totally gaga.
* I did re-read the Josephine Tey novel with that title a few months ago, which might explain it. My mind resembles a rag-bag sometimes, or a slowly simmering pot of minestrone soup.
** No I don’t buy or subscribe to the Times, it’s owned by Murdoch. I do, however, buy the books of collected crosswords from time to time.
5 January 2020 at 23:04 #68845In my case the couple of gins and tonics were before dinner, but I agree with @craig and @spider that, for my money, those two episodes are well above the standard of the last series and suggest that Chibnall is finally hitting his stride. Episode 1 as the opener was highly enjoyable and the Bond theme was fun with all the essential ingredients – improbable gadgets, a casino scene, car/motor bike chases and an evil genius. It was not particularly subtle; but then we haven’t been led to expect subtle from Chibbers, at least not at the same level as Moffat. But this episode was somewhat more complex and in that respect better than the first, even if the resolution did smack a bit of ‘with one bound they were free’ – but then it was ever thus and nothing to get steamed up about.
Ada Gordon/Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan in the same episode? I’m delirious! and super smugly chuffed that I realised the identity of the woman in the bonnet within seconds, as soon as she told the Doctor that she thought the place they were in was her own mind (and before that the Doctor had muttered something about synapses, which should please @pedant ).
The Master, once he revealed his identity did come across at first in rather Simm style manic super-villain mode, but then, towards the end, this façade (?) seemed to dissolve into something much more reflective and nuanced, perhaps presaging a resumption of the intricate love/hate dance with the Doctor. Whether or not this is so, the evidence so far does point to a proper arc this series, and I was very happy to note that the Child of Time reference was picked up again, finally; it did seem too promising a hint to be dropped without further reference, and now it recurs in a context in which Gallifrey and the Time Lords are seemingly gone and everything about them was a lie. I can’t wait (salivating and rubbing hands emoji).
There will no doubt be further thoughts but they will have to wait until I have had a good night’s sleep.
5 January 2020 at 18:31 #68836@juniperfish has expressed beautifully almost everything I could wish to say about Dracula. Gatiss and Moffat have done a brilliant job of adapting and expanding on the story and themes in the original book, even better than their take on Sherlock in the first series in my opinion; the transition at the end of the second episode from the late 19th century to the 21st century was very deftly managed and very effective and I was rivetted to the screen throughout.
This was a Dracula I could really engage with or perhaps – channelling the Count – get my teeth into. Here is the archetypal vampire conceived and fully realised as simultaneously magnetic, repellent and at times truly menacing, and Claes Bang has done a splendid job of portraying him. He is wholly, even flamboyantly self aware and ready with his knowing quips, yet without fundamental self knowledge because he cannot face what, at the core of his being, has driven him throughout the centuries; and he hates mirrors, not because he has no reflection, but because in them he sees something of the reality, ancient and horribly corrupt*. Andin this way he has survived and flourished in his fashion until, at the end, Agatha/Zoe finally discerns the truth within him and, after demonstrating the falsity of so many of the accumulated beliefs he has accepted, confronts him with it, and so he finally accepts and embraces death.
As for the way Mina and Lucy were portrayed, I don’t think that the fact that Mina was little more than a cypher really mattered when we had such a magnificently realised female character as Sister Agatha/Zoe Van Helsing at the centre of the story. But @juniperfish , I was surprised by your description of Lucy as ‘depressed’, because my reading of her was quite different. She struck me as someone fairly self absorbed who had found no aim or purpose beyond having fun and so lived chiefly on the surface, and who flirted with danger and courted risk as a way of giving some spice and meaning to her life, to the point where she was half in love with Death, as encountered in the person of Dracula.
I also watched the programme which followed the last episode, in which Gatiss traced the history of the story and it’s various adaptations on film and TV from the publication of the novel onwards. It was an interesting overview, and I was pleased to discover that his favourite was apparently the TV version set chiefly in Whitby and starring Louis Jourdin, which I also remember being impressed by – though eclipsed by this, I think.
* As in The Picture of Dorian Gray
3 January 2020 at 13:55 #68784Why do I seem to be the only one who thought the electrical charge thingy going down the stringy things, when Yaz was there, seemed neurone-y rather than DNA-y?
You’re not the only one. The stringy things with sparks of light coursing down them, even though not dendritic in form, evoked the idea of nerve fibre/electrical firing, therefore neurones/synapses, for me, too. Not a hint of double helix structure anywhere, though.
It could, of course, represent an alien equivalent of DNA; but without the double helix structure, or even an unstrung single helix, it ain’t DNA.
Talking of which, the spy whose DNA had been rewritten was described by the Doctor as no longer human, just a shell, but unless my memory is faulty the diagnostic display still showed something resembling a double helix, I suspect that the ‘shells’ have been prepared for occupation by the alien invaders. And I’m willing to bet a virtual pint in the pub that the Master ends up in alliance with the Doctor to defeat said aliens 😉
1 January 2020 at 22:44 #68745One worth a rapid re-watch, I think; and I certainly didn’t see *that* coming – though with hindsight the clues were there.
It appears, also, that they have at last relocated the Tardis universal wardrobe, which is a bonus.
31 December 2019 at 20:12 #68707Like @cathannabel and @janetteb I am finding it difficult to summon up even a flicker of optimism in contemplating the year ahead, but there is still a hope that at least a few gleams of sunshine may pierce what looks to be – at least to some of us – the impenetrable gloom of the storm clouds ahead. So, to everyone here, my very best wishes for 2020, stay safe (especially those of you in the antipodes), happy Who viewing, and may each of you, whatever your circumstances, find some personal joys and satisfactions / consolations in at least the small things of life.
17 December 2019 at 17:45 #68613If you think that the adjective ‘decent’ applies in any shape or form to Cummings you are either ill informed or your judgement is seriously askew, and one of the most dismaying things about the House of Commons as currently constituted, and more particularly the Conservatives, is the lack of talent on the front benches.
As for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, when I described him as an unprincipled opportunist the emphasis was on ‘unprincipled’. Many able politicians are opportunists to some extent, but all those who deserve respect in any degree adhere to at least some principles beyond self interest.
I stand corrected 🙂
17 December 2019 at 13:34 #68605Boris has an good and well educated intellect
Well maybe. He certainly had an elite education (Eton and Oxford) and was apparently regarded as bright by his teachers, at least initially. They also concluded that he was bone lazy, and it may be noted that he didn’t get a First Class Oxford degree.
What his record does show is that he is an unprincipled opportunist (he is reported to have considered backing the Remain cause but decided that backing Leave was a surer route to power). He has also displayed a decidedly cavalier attitude to truth. When he was a journalist he was sacked from on newspaper for making up stories out of the whole cloth, and as Brussels correspondent for another paper he was responsible for fabricating some of the more absurd stories about EU regulations – eg Bendy Bananas. Only the gullible would trust any of his promises in the election campaign.
In the campaign he also proved notably reluctant to face questioning by the press or public and ducked altogether out of the TV debate on Climate issues.
17 December 2019 at 13:20 #68604Or there is this, also long but perhaps more readable, which explains why leaving the EU on January 31 is only the beginning and details the options open to the UK trade negotiators and the pitfalls and drawbacks. Suffice it to say that they will not be in a strong position, whichever course they choose.
17 December 2019 at 13:08 #68603Re Brexit Those who are interested and have the time to spare might care to look at this . It is a lengthy and somewhat dense read, but it details the lobbying and pressure groups behind the Brexit campaign and their various agendas and aims. I do not get the impression that these were necessarily in the interests of the majority of those voting leave
15 December 2019 at 19:27 #68565The BBC have another treat in store on Christmas Eve for viewers in the UK: An adaptation by Mark Gatiss of the M R James story Martins Close featuring Peter Capaldi as Dolben. the Prosecutor.
8 November 2019 at 22:01 #68330‘Until it’s done’ is an alternative and perfectly sound approach, but for the novice it does tend to entail hovering over the pan on the hob or checking the oven every five minutes when you could be doing something more productive or entertaining 🙂
8 November 2019 at 20:40 #68328The phrase ‘easy as boiling an egg’ is completely misleading, because it isn’t by any means the easiest task for a cook. If you truly desire guidance I can, being of grandmotherly age if not technically a grandmother, provide some. Otherwise ignore the following.
To start with, it depends on the freshness of the egg, although if you get them from the supermarket it can be assumed that they are more than four days old so that isn’t really a factor. If you get them straight from the hen, they may require longer to cook. The size of the eggs has also to be taken into consideration; large eggs need slightly longer than small ones.
For soft boiled eggs the eggs should be at room temperature to start with*, not straight from the fridge, otherwise the shells are liable to crack. The water should be simmering rather than boiling, with just a few bubbles erupting on the surface, and the eggs should be lowered in gently. After a minute or so you can take the pan off the heat and allow to stand for four to six minutes depending on size, at which point the egg whites should be set. If this isn’t the case, trial and error should sort it. Alternatively you can leave to simmer for three minutes, although this is a bit more hit-and-miss.
For hard boiled eggs start them (also from room temperature) in cold water, bring to simmering point and then give them 7 minutes if small and 9 minutes if large. They should then be cooled immediately under cold running water to prevent them overcooking.
If the shells persist in cracking despite all precautions you could try carefully piercing the big end with a needle, which will reduce internal pressure under heat.
* In UK terms that means around 18 C – 25 C; terms and conditions may vary.
8 November 2019 at 19:48 #68327Very belated congratulations, Thane, on surviving school and graduating! May you succeed and be happy in whatever path you choose to take from now on (provided it’s reasonably legal, of course 😉
As for cookery, if you start with a basic and reliable cookery book and bear in mind that it’s basically just chemistry plus the patience to follow a recipe and a modicum of common sense* it isn’t all that difficult a skill to acquire. After that it helps to have an idea of what flavours go together, but that is to some extent a matter of personal taste. When it comes to basic cookery books, your mother would no doubt agree that you can’t go wrong with Delia Smith, especially her Cookery Course.
* For example; a flat mate of mine at university, following a recipe in one of my cookery books to the letter and not using her knowledge of first principles, failed to spot a misprint and used a tablespoonful of flour instead of a teaspoonful to thicken the gravy in a casserole, then wondered why the result was meat and vegetables embedded in gluey wallpaper paste.
30 October 2019 at 21:06 #68254Avert your eyes now, there be spoilers ahead.
Fair enough, although I did in fact realise that it was a riff on the Hammer Horror Dracula – and possibly on vampires of more recent literature; my point was that I found it so jarring that the satire didn’t work and any subtler intention was lost. Put it down to prejudice on my part if you wish.
As for Spike, notwithstanding the cheekbones* he didn’t strike me as ‘romantic’ in the least, either in intention or in fact. Pre vampire William is a sorry specimen whose pretensions are risible and belied by the samples of his ‘poetry’ which we witness – scarcely qualifying as a poetaster, let alone a poet. As a vampire he is thoroughly nasty but interesting because of his complexity and the conflicting sparks of humanity which survive within his soullessness.
Encouraged by your encomia, pedant, and at puro/syzygy the elder’s prompting, I finally got round to watching Buffy early last year,and the fact that over a period of three months I watched every single episode, some of them twice, speaks for itself. Previously I had ignored the show because the setting and basic premises seemed to embody elements to which I was generally allergic by temperament and acquired taste. Binge watching in that way – or as near to binge watching as I ever get – is probably not ideal anyway because it allows too little time for digestion and reflection, so forgive me if the subtler points sometimes escaped me.
* Even as a teenager I don’t recall ever being so impressionable as to fall for that kind of thing, and certainly not now that I have grown old and cynical.
28 October 2019 at 20:23 #68241As @bluesqueakpip says, that looks distinctly promising, not least because it clearly isn’t going to glamorise or romanticise the vampire.
I disliked the episode of Buffy which featured Dracula precisely because, despite one or two nods to Bram Stoker’s novel, it depicted him as a youthful looking and magnetic, even attractive figure, not at all like Stoker’s character in whose presence Harker feels an instinctive repulsion. In the novel Dracula is described as tall, thin and elderly in appearance, with abnormally pale skin, a thick white moustache, bushy eyebrows which almost meet over his nose, bushy hair receding at the temples, hair on the palms of his hands and halitosis.
On the other hand there is the vampire in Prachett’s Witches Abroad which, in its bat form, has a fatal encounter with Nanny Ogg’s battle scarred tom cat, Greebo. ‘Vampires have risen from the dead, from the grave and from the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat’. Which is reassuring.
15 October 2019 at 23:07 #68183After writing the above, and on reflection, I had feared that the reaction would be ‘too much information’ or ‘teach your grandmother’; so I’m gratified if it was of the least use.
Janette: when it comes to what to put in the compost bin the rule is; no meat or dairy products and no cooked foods – although I think left-over steamed veggies (if you can think of no other use for them) are probably exempt from the latter category. On the rare occasions I have any left-over bread which isn’t actually mouldy (bearing in mind that I bake my own and it keeps pretty well for at least five days) either it is crumbled and fed to the garden birds or dried in the oven at a low temperature and then crushed to make bread crumbs and stored in an airtight jar for later use such as sprinkling on gratin dishes or coating croquettes etc. If it is mouldy it goes in the household waste food bin to be put out for collection by the local council*.
Puro: I oversimplified the role of earthworms somewhat, because there are several different species which occupy different ecological niches. Those which directly process decaying vegetation and are thus helpful in compost making are the various varieties of tiger worm (eisenia) and also the somewhat larger lumbricus rubellus, both of which I think are to be found on all the continents of the world (except Antarctica). Tiger worms are relatively small and thin and generally red or brownish-purple in colour, and are the ones supplied with wormeries. They are also the ones which turn up in my compost. Obviously, there are two preconditions if they are to arrive spontaneously in a compost bin: a) there need to be some already in the vicinity, and b) the base of the compost bin has to be in direct contact with the soil surface. Otherwise you would need to order some to kick-start a population.
The older and more basic compost bins in the utility corner of my garden look somewhat like Daleks, minus the bumps and with a domed lid instead of the rotating top part with the eye-stalk, sink plunger and weaponry, and they stand directly on the soil surface, so the arrival of the worms in their contents is no mystery. The ones in the new roller-ball composter could have crawled over the base and in through the holes in the drum, but it’s also possible they arrived as cocoons in stuff transferred from a Dalek, because over the winter, while the compost in the rotating drum is maturing, I put all the kitchen waste etc in one of the latter. Then, in late spring, I transfer the made compost into another, empty Dalek for storage until needed, and the stuff accumulated over the winter forms the first instalment of the new batch in the drum.
Most of the other kinds of earthworms found in garden soil feed chiefly on fungi growing on decayed vegetable matter rather than on the vegetable matter itself so it is a two stage process, with the fungi having the primary role in breaking down the humus; but some types of worm actually drag dead leaves and stems lying on the surface down into the soil. When the large and very bushy Japanese Maple in the middle of my lawn sheds its leaves I use them to mulch the surface of the adjoining herbaceous border. The leaves lie there over the winter, but by late spring they have all disappeared, dragged down into the depths by those industrious little helpers.
As for my gardening activities at the moment, I’m suffering acute frustration. October in this region can usually be relied upon to provide a fair number of calm days with hazy sunshine – ideal weather for preparing the garden for its winter sleep. Instead we have had day after day of wind and rain, and the occasional dry day has generally been heavily overcast with quite strong winds (all possibly the tail ends of a succession of hurricanes and tropical storms which have been funnelling northwards up the Atlantic). My garden is fairly sheltered by surrounding trees, but even so conditions have not been inviting.
* Norwich is very keen on recycling, and not just plastics, metal cans and paper. They also collect garden waste, which is useful when it comes to things like prunings and hedge clippings which aren’t suitable for the home compost bin and which are shredded and composted in industrial quantities for use in municipal parks and gardens or for resale.
15 October 2019 at 20:58 #68182So very sorry to learn of your recent painful losses. When the death of a beloved relative is followed so closely by that of a much loved pet I can well understand how much the latter serves to compound the grief and make the process of adjustment all the more difficult. It is good to know that you have the support of family and friends so close to hand.
My sympathy and a virtual hug
Mudlark
7 October 2019 at 22:06 #68165OK, here I am in the pub with a pint (actually a glass of merlot) to hand. So where were we? Ah, yes, compost and soil health.
The basic principle is; you have to put back into the soil what you take out of it or it loses its fertility, and if you are not to spend a small fortune on buying manure and/or chemical fertilizer it pays to have a compost bin or two to process garden waste and household vegetable waste.
Healthy soil contains lots of humus from decaying vegetable matter, worms to aerate the soil and process the vegetable matter through their efficient little digestive systems, and myriad bacteria and other micro-organisms to fix nitrogen and otherwise work their biochemical magic. Anything you grow will take out the nutrients, both for the plants and the supportive micro-organisms, so the more you feed the soil the more you will get out of it. Medieval farmers used to leave part of the arable land fallow in alternate years between crops and graze their animals on the fallow land so that the dung would fertilize it. Later farmers cut out the fallow bit and spread the ploughland with manure from their farmyard middens, and later still they established scientifically the benefits of crop rotation and using leguminous crops to fix nitrogen in the soil. Then they discovered chemical fertilizers which worked wonders, except that these didn’t replenish the humus and the micro-organisms in the soil so that, except on ‘organic’ farms which still employ traditional mixed farming methods, farmland soil is now effectively inert and infertile if not dosed with yet more chemical fertilizer, the surplus of which drains off into rivers and the water table with all sorts of knock on consequences.
Which may not seem to have much to do with gardening, but the same principles apply.
Wormeries, which come supplied with the necessary worms, are an efficient way of processing kitchen vegetable waste and as an end product produce a fine organic compost and a liquid which, diluted in a ratio of about 1:10 is a good liquid fertilizer. Compost bins are, in my opinion, better all round. In them you can put not just vegetable waste from the kitchen*, but all waste from the garden, including annual weeds and the leaves (but not the roots) of perennial weeds, annuals from the flower beds once they have finished flowering, the chopped back remnants of end-of-season perennials, fallen leaves and grass clippings – although grass clippings have to be thoroughly mixed with other material or you end up with a slimy, evil-smelling mat. Ideally the mix should include a balance of green material which is high in nitrogen, and dry material which contains more carbon – and that can include shredded paper and cardboard. For best results the mixture should be forked over periodically to mix everything evenly and aerate it, and since that is a labour intensive chore there are compost bins which can be rotated on an axle or by other means. There are also compost accelerators which you can buy to add to the compost and help speed the process, but they are not essential.
I have a state-of-the-art composter which consists of an almost spherical drum mounted on rollers on a dished, hollow base, and every time I add anything I rotate it two or three times to keep the contents well mixed. In the base of the drum there are holes through which any liquid drains into the hollow base, and this year I tapped about seven litres which, diluted, I can use as additional fertilizer. I have never needed to buy a supply of worms because they arrive in the compost bins all by themselves, bless them!
Ideally I could do with two of these rotary composters, one to contain the maturing compost and one the compost-in-the-making, but since I don’t have room for two I have a couple of conventional bins as well.
And here endeth the oracular utterance of Mudlark the gardener, take it as you may 😉
*Kitchen waste can include anything of vegetable or fruit origin, including tea leaves and coffee grounds, although I would advise ripping open tea bags and discarding the ‘bags’ unless you want your garden to be littered with little grey rags. The bags containing the tea do not compost efficiently. I now use leaf tea in a tea pot with an infuser basket, so I no longer have that problem. Crushed egg shells are a good addition, but definitely no meat products or bread, or the compost will stink and you will attract vermin.
7 October 2019 at 20:13 #68163The YouTube 50th anniversary collection doesn’t include any of the three specials in question. It is a compilation featuring the seven Doctors of the original series 1963-1989 plus the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann who appeared in the 1996 film aka ‘the film we do not mention’ because it was so dire – although Paul McGann was potentially an excellent incarnation of the Doctor and subsequently featured in many audio episodes.
The sequence is: Name of the Doctor, Night of the Doctor, Day of the Doctor and Time of the Doctor, after which follows the 8th series of the after gap (AG) sequence. Night of the Doctor is, as @pedant said, a mini-episode available only on line. It isn’t essential viewing. but it does bridge the gap between the film we do not mention, The Day of the Doctor and the first episode of the revived show in 2005, and establishes that the film, however unsatisfactory, is canon. The fact that the Day of the Doctor is a special in the 7th series but chronologically precedes the first series AG is only confusing if you overlook the fact that this is a show featuring time travel.
As for how to access Day and Time of the Doctor, I think that they are still available on Netflix, though I haven’t checked, but if you can’t access them there then I suggest that your best bet other than *dodgydownloads.com* would be to look for the DVDs, either to purchase or to borrow.
7 October 2019 at 12:21 #68159The answer to you first question is yes, you do need to view the specials in order before you embark on Series 8, otherwise you might get a bit of a shock.
7 October 2019 at 12:17 #68158Lady Hale is a judge and President of the Supreme Court of the UK. She is known for her collection of zoomorphic jewellery – chiefly insects and amphibians, and when she read out the unanimous ruling of the SC that Boris Johnson had acted unconstitutionally in proroguing Parliament for five weeks she was wearing a brooch in the form of a large spider.
I did wonder how many outside the UK – or within it for that matter – would get the joke. My brother (the one in France), who is usually quick on the uptake in these matters and whose sense of humour tends to be similar to mine surprised me by being unamused and sniffy . Apparently he has always been too cool for The Who which surprised me; his taste in music always seemed pretty wide and eclectic. Now he has joined a choir which sings mainly liturgical stuff and laments that he is a bass baritone and tenors have all the fun 🙁
I could bore on for hours on the subject of garden compost and wormeries, but that is probably a subject best discussed over a pint in the pub.
4 October 2019 at 20:06 #68140Welcome to the Forum.
There are only 13 episodes in season* 7, episode 13 being The Name of the Doctor. In addition to these there are two specials for the same year; the 50th anniversary special ‘The Day of the Doctor’ which aired on 23rd November 2013, the anniversary of the day in 1963 on which the first ever episode of Doctor Who was broadcast, and the Christmas special, The Time of the Doctor. The Day of the Doctor was also shown in cinemas in 3D, which was pretty spectacular.
The 8th, 9th and 10th seasons each consist of 12 episodes plus Christmas specials, but there was a gap in 2016 when there was just the Christmas special, The Return of Dr Mysterio. Season 11, the most recent, consists of 10 slightly longer episodes plus a New Year special, and the next season will be in 2020, which is a frustratingly long wait and the main reason why the Forum is fairly quiet at the moment.
Hope that clears things up for you. Happy viewing of all that you have still to come!
* In the UK we generally refer to each separate sequence of episodes as a ‘series’ rather than, as in the USA, a ‘season’ , but either term will be understood here 😉
28 September 2019 at 20:38 #68132Lady Hale’s arachnid brooch seems to have attracted a good deal of attention, so this seems appropriate
27 August 2019 at 22:14 #68033@thane16 (syzygy the elder)
Apologies, but even after due and cautious reflection I feel an irresistible urge to indulge in a Mudlark nitpick:
our funny, celery wearing, tennis clothed Doctor
wore a cricketer’s outfit and even, if my memory is to be relied on, wielded a cricket bat occasionally. But perhaps it is insensitive of me to remind you of that fact, so soon after England snatched a near miraculous victory from the jaws of certain defeat in the second test of the Ashes series 😈
27 August 2019 at 20:35 #68032@thane16 (syzygy the elder)
Whatever made you think that I might be annoyed? 🙂
Welcome from me, also.
As @janetteb says, the Peter Cushing films were a spin-off from the original TV show, the first episode of which, featuring William Hartnell as the Doctor, was broadcast by the BBC on 23rd November 1963 – although the debut was somewhat overshadowed by events across the pond on the previous day. I guess that you are unaware of the excellent BBC film drama ‘An Adventure in Space and Time’ which is about the origins of the show, its inception, development and early years, and the people involved. If you are interested, you can find it by clicking on ‘Forums’ at the top of the page, and then scrolling down to ‘First Doctor’.
As pitched originally, Doctor Who was conceived as a show for children of around 12 years which would be both entertaining and to some extent educational, and in the early years it tended to alternate stories with a historical setting and those with a science/space travel/futuristic theme. As quickly became evident, it attracted an audience of a much wider age range and has always been seen as a family show. It really took off with the introduction of the Daleks.
I agree with you that from today’s perspective the relatively few 1960s episodes which survive can seem slow, with quite a lot of ‘padding’ between the cliff-hangers, the production values were comparatively low and there was little in the way of what we would now think of as special effects. But speaking for myself and I think many others who were around then, that didn’t seem important at the time. The show was produced under very tight time constraints in a cramped studio, and on a budget that by comparison with the money available even then to commercial stations in the US was minuscule. On the other hand, at least in my opinion at the time and since, the delineation of the characters was much more subtle and the stories tended to be less formulaic than e.g. in the original series of Star Trek, and there was ample scope for the imagination.
As you will have seen, things are relatively quiet here at the moment with no new episodes to discuss, but if you feel inclined to browse while we wait more or less impatiently, all discussions of previous episodes are archived under ‘forums’,
16 August 2019 at 21:36 #67957 -
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